1From all our machines put together, from all our roads charted in miles, from all our accumulated tonnage, from all our arrayed aeroplanes, from our regulations, from our conditioning, not the slightest feeling could emerge. That is of another order, and real, and infinitely more exalted. From all your manufactured thoughts, from all your graded concepts, from all your concerted measures, not the slightest frisson of genuine civilization could result.That is of another order, infinitely more exalted and sur-rational.

4True civilizations are poetic shocks: the shock of the stars, of the sun, the plant, the animal, the shock of the round globe, of the rain, of the light, of numbers, the shock of life, the shock of death. Since the sun temple, since the mask, since the Indian, since the African man, too much distance has been calculated here, has been granted here, between things and ourselves.

5The true manifestation of civilization is myth. Social organization, religion, partnerships, philosophies, morals, architecture and sculpture are the representations and expressions of myth.

6Civilization is dying all around the world because myths are dead or dying or being born. We must wait for the powdery frost of outdated or emaciated myths to blow apart. We are awaiting the debacle.

7...And we shall be fulfilled.

8In the current state of things, the only avowed refuge of the mythic spirit is poetry. And poetry is an insurrection against society because it is a devotion to abandoned or exiled or obliterated myth.

9Civilization is not built by means of schools, clinics and statistical calculations. Only the poetic spirit corrodes and builds, erases and invigorates.

10The Caribbean has no civilization because the Caribbean suns poetry. Scandalously. We has lost the meaning of the symbol. The literal has devoured our world. Scandalously.

11Civilization is generalized participation in essence. Civilization is a wondrous generalized communion. We are at its mass stage. And the essence of facts, like that of the real, escapes us, initiated as we are to application alone: crude application. Only the poetic spirit links and reunites.

12The vital thing is to re-establish a personal, fresh, compelling, magical contact with things. The revolution will be social and poetic or will not be.

13I don’t hide the fact that I expect everything from a new barbarism.

14True civilization is in the realm of obsession. Civilization is an absurd idea which, felt and lived in its entirety, by that very fact and by that fact alone, becomes true. I preach obsession. The true ideal: the ‘possessed’ woman.

15To resituate joy and pain, acceptance and creation in the cosmos.

16Civilization is born of individual sincerity, individual daring, from that part of individual disorder that everyone carries within him and that he owes it to himself to expand and communicate and that gradually takes over like irresistible tall flames. Keep your distance, wet blankets. Give us back our power of wonderment.

17I’m calling upon the magician.

18Civilization is neither a policeman nor a mechanic. Its foundation is neither order as order, nor work as work. I admire the perspicacity of poets. Baudelaire celebrating the useless and the dandy. Mallarme pouring scorn on bread. Rimbaud spewing on the ‘centuries of hands’. And Breton announcing: ‘Professions are withering away.’ The true poet does not preach work. He preaches availability. To be better able to reach the heart of things. I demand the right to indolence.

19A new attitude towards the object. After the exploitative nonsense that is our bourgeois, comfortable attitude, it is healthy and profoundly important that Andre Breton restores liberating, catalysing and dangerous power to the object, that he gives back the profaned object its dignity of mystery and its radiant force, that, when all’s said and done, he makes of it again what it should never have ceased to be: the Great Intercessor. Once generalized, this attitude will lead us to the great mad sweep of renewal.

This morning, stirred beneath the agitation of raincame three white-collar magpies to my lawn.Jehovah's Witness-like they knockedthey knocked upon my window pane,stood black demanding entrance. I held my groundbut they were smart and oh-so-keen,so upright, firm they pushed their song at me,surprised my shrinking soul.

Scrambled eggs and whiskeyin the false-dawn light. Chicago,a sweet town, bleak, God knows,but sweet. Sometimes. Andweren't we fine tonight?When Hank set up that limpingtreble roll behind memy horn just growled and I thought my heart would burst.And Brad pressing with thesoft stick and Joe-Annesinging low. Here we are nowin the White Tower, leaningon one another, too tiredto go home. But don't say a word,don't tell a soul, they wouldn'tunderstand, they couldn't, neverin a million years, how fine,how magnificent we werein that old club tonight.

A THOUSAND martyrs I have made, All sacrificed to my desire,A thousand beauties have betray'd That languish in resistless fire:The untamed heart to hand I brought,And fix'd the wild and wand'ring thought.

I never vow'd nor sigh'd in vain, But both, tho' false, were well received;The fair are pleased to give us pain, And what they wish is soon believed:And tho' I talk'd of wounds and smart,Love's pleasure only touch'd my heart.

Alone the glory and the spoil I always laughing bore away;The triumphs without pain of toil, Without the hell the heaven of joy;And while I thus at random roveDespise the fools that whine for love.

Less time than it takes to say, less tears than it takes to die; I’ve taken account ofeverything,there you have it. I’ve made a census of the stones, they are as numerous as my fingers and someothers; I’ve distributed some pamphlets to the plants, but not all were willing to accept them. I’vekept company with music for a second only and now I no longer known what to thinkof suicide, forif I ever want to part from myself, the exit is on this side and, I add mischievously, the entrance, there-entrance is on the other. You see what you still have to do. Hours, grief, I don’tkeep areasonable account of them; I’m alone, I look out of the window; there is nopasserby, or rather noone passes (underline passes). You don’t know this man? It’s Mr. Same. May Iintroduce MadamMadam? And their children. Then I turn back on my steps, my steps turn back too,but I don’tknow exactly what they turn back on. I consult a schedule; the names of the townshave beenreplaced by the names of people who have been quite close to me. Shall I go to A,return to B,change at X? Yes, of course I’ll change at X. Provided I don’t miss the connectionwith boredom!There we are: boredom, beautiful parallels, ah! how beautiful the parallels areunder God’sperpendicular.

Our lives, discoloured with our present woes,May still grow white and shine with happier hours.So the pure limped stream, when foul with stainsOf rushing torrents and descending rains,Works itself clear, and as it runs refines,till by degrees the floating mirror shines;Reflects each flower that on the border grows,And a new heaven in it’s fair bosom shows.